6 ½ Weeks – Ferdinand Waas

The exhibition brings together video works by Ferdinand Waas from 2025 and 2026 to form a trilogy: Ode to Joy, An Apple a Day, The Border Is Still There and One Night in Ibiza. The works are being shown together for the first time; for Ode to Joy and One Night in Ibiza, this is their first presentation in an exhibition. The three works are linked by the fact that they are manifestations of found realities that challenge the prevailing norms and values of the European Union. The artist himself appears in all three videos – playing the violin, searching for British party tourists, and working as a smuggler at an open border.

ODE TO JOY / Ode an die Freude / ოდა სიხარულს
The video work shows a live recording of the performance of the European anthem and Ferdinand Waas' failed attempt to play along on the violin. Waas performs the music together with a string quartet of students from the Tbilisi State Conservatory, consisting of Lika Kalmakhelidze, Mariam Iakobidze, Natali Turiatkova and Salome Stroganova.

Ferdinand Waas' interest in the Georgian Chamber Orchestra was sparked when he was a teenager growing up in Ingolstadt. The orchestra has been based there since a tour of Germany in 1990 due to political developments in its home country.

During his stay in Tbilisi, Waas examined the presence of European symbols, which had increased significantly in the run-up to the Georgian parliamentary elections on 26 October 2024. To this day, there are daily protests with European flags in front of the parliament building. Learning and playing the anthem is understood as an act of European solidarity. In addition, making music served as a tool for exploring the collective memory and identity of artists living in exile.

Waas spent two months learning the piece on the violin under the guidance of former members of the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, Igor Loboda and Nodar Jvania. The Ode to Joy project was developed in collaboration with former members of the Georgian Chamber Orchestra, students from the Tbilisi State Conservatory and Ilia State University, and with the support of culture moves europe and the Goethe Institute.

AN APPLE A DAY, THE BORDER IS STILL THERE
Alluding to the saying ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away!’, Ferdinand Waas explores in this video work the question of how permeable Europe's borders actually are – for goods and for people.

On the occasion of the Capital of Culture year 2025, Ferdinand Waas was invited to a residency in Gorizia / Görz / Gorica / Gurize. The city, which existed as a political entity until 1947, now consists of two independent cities located close to each other, with a national border running between them. Here, the basic idea of the Schengen area, to create a common area of free travel and trade, is of particular importance in everyday life.

As the camera accompanies Waas on his journey from Nova Gorica to Gorizia and back in a single, uninterrupted shot with no visible cuts, we see him being stopped and checked at the border. The movement of goods, on the other hand, runs smoothly: the apple bought in Slovenia can be transported without being checked and finds its new home in the apple basket in Italy.

Due to enormous price increases in the region, there were calls to boycott local supermarkets. In response, Waas chose a simple act for his work: an apple is bought on the slovenian side of the boder and discreetly placed among the apples in an Italian supermarket, then an apple is bought there and discreetly brought back to the Slovenian supermarket to be placed among the apples.

ONE NIGHT IN IBIZA
A night-time stroll by tourist Waas, who films himself with a selfie stick, through the suburb of Playa d'en Bossa on the holiday island of Ibiza. The streets are deserted, with occasional encounters with people and an atmosphere of desolation – evoked by neon signs and the walker's indecisive gaze.

Waas develops the video work against the backdrop of the question of how overtourism affects tourist hotspots. The built infrastructure is clearly designed for a larger number of people than actually live in the town. The shops and restaurants are not geared towards everyday needs, which could be met by supermarkets, bakeries, fruit and vegetable shops, for example, but towards an exclusively pleasure-oriented lifestyle, for which a multitude of restaurants, clubs, bars and party locations are available.

‘Party flights’ bring numerous tourists to the beach to party at low prices – departing from Germany around noon and returning from the island in the early hours of the following day. People come to celebrate and spend wonderful, exuberant hours. What remains is money, rubbish, exhausted service staff and gloomy streets.

Waas himself followed these travel routes and spent one night in Ibiza. On his walk through the streets of Playa d'en Bossa, the world-famous party suburb of Ibiza Town, he searched unsuccessfully for partygoers and a night of revelry in the off-season. Even after Brexit, the island remains a central location of the ‘European summer’ for tourists from the United Kingdom. Since the 1970s, Ibiza has served as a retreat and projection site for Britons seeking to escape economic and social restrictions in their home country, significantly fuelling mass tourism.

FERDINAND WAAS
Ferdinand Waas is an artist and mediator. His work is based on encounters, conversations, recordings, memories and documentation, which he captures through various media. By tracing and narrating the often invisible and mostly unknown, by focusing on the observed detail, he attempts to decipher and question prevailing norms.

Born in Ingolstadt in 1998, Waas studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, and fine arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He completed his studies in The Hague in the summer of 2024 with his diploma film Showmatch. His solo exhibitions include Nada más que la verdad, Segismundo, Guatemala City (2025), Pirate Bay and Chill, DDD Kunsthaus, Yerevan (2024), and Show Match, K4 galleri, Oslo (2024). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at YFD, Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (2025), Please RSVP, the servers, The Hague (2025) and Tense Tides, Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam (2024), among others.

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